Returnees from Albania

The case of the Returnees from Albania was a massive criminal trial in an Egyptian military court from February to April 1999. The trial is one of the principal sources of information (and allegations) about Sunni terrorist groups in the 1990s, especially al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and its offshoot Egyptian Islamic Jihad headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri; it is a landmark case in the topics of extraordinary rendition and the credibility of the testimony of terrorism detainees.

The local Egyptian press coined the informal name of the case, "Returnees from Albania", which referred to a number of suspects who were captured in Albania and then somehow transported to Egypt, with little if any formal extradition process. Some reports use the term "the Albanian Arabs" for that group plus others who had visited them in Albania and were later extradited to Egypt by Azerbaijan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. The prosecution leaned somewhat on the testimony of the returnee Ahmad al-Naggar and on evidence and interrogation records that were collected in Albania with CIA assistance.

Documentation and terminology

A complete transcript of the trial and interrogations is not available. The partial transcripts, as well as the press reports from the time, are mostly in Arabic.

Those documents speak of "the jihad group" or "the jihad organization", meaning al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya as it was at that time. Most of al-Gama'a later renounced violence, but a violent residue called Islamic Jihad remained; that group was later known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) to distinguish it from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The remnants of EIJ and at least one person in the violent fugitive component of Gama'a (namely Mohammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim) have since merged with al-Qaeda.

Reportage of events in the early 1990s mentions one more group, or rather one more name for some of the same people: Vanguards of Conquest. That was the faction of EIJ that was led by al-Zawahiri after the capture and sentencing of 'Abbud al-Zumar, the first emir of EIJ.

The charges

Broadly, the aim of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya was to bring about the destruction of the Egyptian government, followed by its replacement with a sharia-based Islamist regime. To get there, the plan was to kill and intimidate government members, destroy the Egyptian tourism industry, and create fear and distrust in the Egyptian population. In more detail, the trial addressed
*several bombings of banks
*the 1990 assassination of the chairman of the Egyptian parliament Dr. Rif'at al-Mahjub
*the 1993 assassination of Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi, which killed four others also
*the 1993 assassination attempt against Prime Minister Atef Sedki, in which a child was killed
*the 1994 assassination of Major General Ra'uf Khayrat (assistant director of the Egyptian intelligence service) in Cairo
*the 1995 assassination of Egyptian attaché Ahmed Alaa Nazmi in Switzerland [http://www.tkb.org/Group.jsp?groupID=4373 MIPT profile] of the "International Justice Group", an alias of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya at that time]
*the 1995 assassination attempt against President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa (26 June; EIJ claim responsibility)
*the 1995 bombing of Egypt's embassy in Pakistan, killing 15 people; an intended simultaneous mass murder of tourists at Khan al-Khalili did not materialize.
*the 1997 massacre of tourists at Luxor

The accused

There were altogether 107 accused persons, of whom 60 were tried "in absentia". Twenty were acquitted, nine sentenced to death (all "in absentia"), 11 to life at hard labour, and 67 to sentences of from one to 25 years.

The trial concluded that the "constituent assembly" of al-Gama'a contained these fifteen names. [http://www.metransparent.com/texts/interrogation_minutes_najjar_to_qaida_1.htm Trancript of part of al-Naggar's testimony] , part 1 of 6, "Middle East Transparent"] [http://www.metransparent.com/texts/interrogation_minutes_najjar_to_qaida_2.htm Trancript of part of al-Naggar's testimony] , part 2 of 6, "Middle East Transparent"] [http://www.metransparent.com/texts/interrogation_minutes_najjar_to_qaida_3.htm Trancript of part of al-Naggar's testimony] , part 3 of 6, "Middle East Transparent"] [http://www.metransparent.com/texts/interrogation_minutes_najjar_to_qaida_4.htm Trancript of part of al-Naggar's testimony] , part 4 of 6, "Middle East Transparent"] [http://www.metransparent.com/texts/interrogation_minutes_najjar_to_qaida_5.htm Trancript of part of al-Naggar's testimony] , part 5 of 6, "Middle East Transparent"] [http://www.metransparent.com/texts/interrogation_minutes_najjar_to_qaida_6.htm Trancript of part of al-Naggar's testimony] , part 6 of 6, "Middle East Transparent"]

Funding and travel

Ahmad al-Naggar's controversial confession says that the money involved was not great and that it basically "came from Usama bin Ladin". But how exactly the agents in Albania got hold of money is not so simple. It seems probable that one or more Sunni terrorist charities were involved; both al-Haramain Foundation and Global Relief Foundation had branches in Tirana, and a third charity front, Benevolence International Foundation, had an office in Baku. (Al-Naggar himself held a low-paid job in Tirana as a teacher of Arabic for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, but that group was not accused nor incriminated in any way in the Returnees affair. On the contrary, al-Naggar was expected to get a job in Albania and give 10% of his wages to the terrorist group of which he himself was a member.)

References

Some of the 1999 coverage by Asharq al-Awsat, in English translation by Foreign Broadcast Information Service:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1999/03/990306-cairo.htm

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1999/03/990306-cairo-2.htm

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1999/03/990306-cairo-3.htm

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1999/03/990306-cairo-4.htm

A front page article, not available online, but quoted by various other writers:

Andrew Higgins and Christopher Cooper, "Cloak and Dagger: A CIA-Backed Team Used Brutal Means to Crack Terror Cell", Wall Street Journal, 20 November 2001